Latvia’s ‘economic growth’ was an illusion which is now completely shattered, argues Viktor Posudnevsky in the wake of last week’s street riots in Riga.
Year after year, Lat-via’s top politicians would glowingly announce new figures testifying to the country’s unparalleled economic growth. Latvia was hailed as a major success story, a new EU country whose prosperity was steadily increasing and would soon match that of its western neighbours.
A foreigner’s impression of Riga, Latvia’s capital, would likely be along the same lines. Many Irish people have expressed to me their admiration of Riga, how beautiful the city was and how well it was kept.
I would have agreed. My native city has changed a lot in the last 15 to 20 years. New shiny buildings sprang up, each costing a fortune. The number of shopping centres would surely surpass that of New York. And the sheer amount of luxury goods within them – expensive cars, jewellery and designer clothes – would even make good competition for Paris.
The streets and parks, at least in the city centre, would be so clean they’d almost shine along with the buildings. And in the midst of this Baltic Dubai, smoothly dressed men and women enjoyed their morning croissants in overpriced cafes.
But I never liked this new-fangled pristine facade and have always considered it to be a veneer under which the real face of Riga could be sometimes glimpsed. After all, one only had to drive 20 minutes away from the city centre to see a very different Riga – one made up of Soviet apartment blocks and old streets filled with crumbling wooden houses that nobody cared about.
Dirty, forgotten and virtually unchanged since I was a baby – that was the familiar Riga. You would see drunks and the local yobs and the typical faces of people who have worked hard all their lives in some unpleasant jobs and got absolutely nothing for it. After this, the shiny buildings and the pristine avenues seemed like a mirage.
The lives of many of my compatriots were a mirage of a similar kind. People were buying cars and expensive clothes, moving into new apartments. Their success was for everyone to see, but how fragile it was. If you scratched under the surface, most of this spending was actually on credit from financial institutions. Both the political elite running the country and the ordinary citizens were borrowing recklessly, gambling on the probability of things staying the way they were. They refused to see that the ‘growth’ might come to an abrupt end, in which case they would have nothing to fall back on.
And last year it happened. Something that was recognised only subconsciously, a doubt that was gnawing from the inside, suddenly became real – as real and harsh as the sound of a doorbell rung by a bailiff coming to repossess your car.
But not only did Latvia’s the elites seem to ignore these wake-up calls which were sounding all over the country – they continued living the dream! The most outrageous example was the former Minister for Culture Helena Demakova, who sanctioned a project for the construction of a multi-million-euro concert hall, just as Latvia received emergency credit from the International Monetary Fund and lowered salaries for public sector workers (that minister has recently resigned, citing health reasons).
Protests outside the parliament building became a regular occurrence last year, but they brought little change. However, the street riots last week were a different case. Latvians the world over were shocked at this brief and violent outburst because this normally quiet and conflict-avoiding nation simply does not engage in this sort of behaviour. The last known instance of street violence in Latvia was in 1991, a low-key outburst during the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union.
As he was condemning the street riots in an address the next morning, the current Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis said: “Today we woke up in a different Latvia.” One can only hope that these words accurately describe how he felt.
